The historically close relationship between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia hit a snag recently over differences in how to address India’s decision last year to revoke the special autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir, a Muslim-majority state that is also claimed by Pakistan. Pakistani officials had repeatedly urged Saudi Arabia to convene a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, or OIC, to discuss Kashmir, to no avail. Finally, in early August, Pakistan’s foreign minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, took the unprecedented step of publicly criticizing Riyadh. Appearing on a TV talk show, he threatened to “call a meeting of the Islamic countries [...]
After a series of setbacks, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a multibillion-dollar assortment of infrastructure projects that constitutes the Pakistani component of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, is poised for a resurgence. Or is it? Last month, the Pakistani investigative news site FactFocus published a damning expose about Asim Bajwa, the head of a government body overseeing CPEC. It claims that Bajwa’s family developed an extensive overseas business empire, without declaring many of those assets. The allegations come at an inconvenient time for Islamabad, just as it tries to right CPEC’s ship. Launched in 2015, CPEC is a logical partnership for [...]
ADDU, Maldives—Visitors are slowly returning to the famous beach resorts of this island nation in the Indian Ocean after it reopened its borders last month, having largely contained its initial wave of COVID-19. While it failed to avoid the virus entirely, the Maldives has registered a relatively small caseload of around 5,300, including 21 deaths, confined largely to its crowded capital, Male. In recent days, however, community transmission across the atolls has increased at an alarming pace. Around a third of the country’s estimated 550,000-strong population live in Male, on one of the most densely populated islands on the planet, [...]
